Okay, well they weren’t technically on Broadway but close enough.  Point is, the Yanks got served again by the Red Sox.  Thought they’d get saved by the mercy rule, but you’ve got to be down by ten for that to kick in, and right now there is no mercy for the Yanks or their fans.

It was close for a minute–a two run game after seven–then Jose Veras and David Robertson got bombed in the eighth and that was that.  11-3 was the final.  Sidney Ponson gave up four runs and didn’t make it out of the fourth while Paul Byrd kept the Yankees off balance allowing just a couple of runs over six (I think the Bombers must have hit three or four homers foul against him.)  Alex Rodriguez had a pair of doubles in his first two at bats, bouncing back from a tough game on Tuesday but that turned out to be a minor positive note in what turned out to be another uninspired loss. 

The Yanks are making this easy.  The way they are playing it’s as if the end of the season can’t come soon enough.  They don’t seem to have any fight in them right now.  Man, even if they are going to miss the playoffs it’d be nice to see them play spoiler.  That seems like a stretch though doesn’t it? 

Meanwhile, even more upsetting is this piece from Deadspin.  Reportedly, a fan was escorted from the Stadium recently for wanting to use the restroom while "God Bless America" played.  Did you guys even know the Yankees had a policy about fan movement during the playing of "God Bless America?"  I sure didn’t.  Over at Futility Infielder, Jay Jaffe pulls no punches:

I’ve taken many a restroom break during “God Bless America” during my days and nights at Yankee Stadium, and I’ve not only never been harassed by anyone for doing so, I was never aware that they actually had a policy — almost certainly illegal and blatantly unconstitutional — to try to quell such activity. Nonetheless, given the ever-eroding quality of my own experiences at the stadium in recent years, I fear that the allegations are true.

Yankee Stadium security deserves no benefit of the doubt here, nor in this instance does the Steinbrenner family if they’re the ones who have ordered the policy be implemented. Forcing paying customers to stand at rapt attention during a song isn’t some cute little attempt at patriotism to bolster the legacy of Mr. Born on the Fourth of July Steinbrenner, it’s FASCISM. Roughing them up over their failure to stand still during a canned recording of a song that’s been drained of all meaning by its endless repetition is in diametric opposition to what the song and the country it so proudly celebrates stand for; this is about as un-American as you can get.

Furthermore, this incident puts the lie to any claim regarding “the hallowed ground of Yankee Stadium” at a time when the ballpark’s history is being celebrated and its demise mourned. The Yankees deserve to reap all of the bad PR they’ve sown with this, and the Steinbrenner family can cram it up their Yankee Doodle Dandies until they figure out why they’re in the wrong.

I didn’t know about this Yankee Stadium policy but I think it an outrage. It doesn’t exactly surprise me but it is beyond disappointing.